Category Archives: Horror

Horrible Imaginings Review #1 DEAD

The pandemic has forced the cancelation of many beloved events and some, like Horrible Imaginings Film Festival have move to an on-line model for 2020. So, while I have been deprived the pleasure of seeing friends and making new ones at the Frieda Cinema in Orange county this year, I have not been denied access to nearly 30 hours of horror cinema.

While the festival opened Wednesday evening with a double feature of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and its 2020 remake for me and my sweetie-wife we started Thursday night with the New Zealand Feature length horror Comedy Dead.

Dead is the story of a stoner who has discovered a combination of marijuana and neurological medications that allow him to see and interact with ghosts, the ghost of an uptight and obsessive police officer, an attorney with a drinking problem and house arrest as they search for a serial killer stalking Wellington New Zealand.

Tilting decidedly more towards comedy than horror Dead is an entertaining little movie just under an hour and half the film delivers with talents performances, colorful cinematography, and just the right blend of explicit gore to light-hearted comedy with a touch of heart all wrapped in a light air of mystery surrounding the killer.

Dead made for an excellent launch to this year’s festival and I look forward to diving into the short film block and more feature films from around the globe.

 

Share

Missing My Shockwaves Podcast

When it came to my podcast listening Fridays used to be horror days. It was the day the new episode of Shockwaves would drop with its multiple hosts discussing the last films that they had watched, the film that they had produced, and interviewing some of the most interesting voices in horror. Then in Jun massive sexual scandal rocked the parent company and Shockwaves vanished from my feed.

I’ve been searching out some sort of suitable replacement but the search has been difficult. There are lots of horror podcast but finding one with the right mix of people with the right base of knowledge feels impossible. Shockwavesintroduced me to several interesting films and while my taste never matched exactly with any of the hosts there was an enough of an overlap that I could find new stuff to watch and even understand them enough to know why we didn’t agree on some.

They will be missed.

Share

Series Review: Lovecraft Country

Sunday night saw HBO’s premier of the long anticipated series adaptation of Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country.

I have not read the novel so my impressions of the series and the only ‘aired’ episode so far is driven entirely by the onscreen material.

Episode one centered on Atticus ‘Tic’ Freeman (Jonathan Majors) an army veteran recently discharged following the Korean War’s armistice as he travels home to Chicago because his father has gone missing. Uniting with his Father’s brother George (Courtney B. Vance), who travels researching his guide to safe travels for Black people in Jim Crow America, and childhood friend Letitia (Jurnee Smollett), he travels to ‘Lovecraft country’, rural Massachusetts, following clues to his father’s disappearance and hints of an ancestral legacy.

Aside from a vivid dream sequence at the episode’s opening Lovecraft Countytakes its time revealing its cosmic horror nature instead rightly focusing on character, mood, and critically environment creating a believable and frightening world with terrors drawn from history as well as the imagination. Jonathan Majors is well cast as ‘Tic,’ the bookish young man with a love of pulp adventures now grown into a handsome muscular man but with those same doubts and self-image issues waiting just under the surface. Jurnee Smollett’s Letitia while seemingly a woman who appears primarily as a sensualist also possesses depths and intellect that in the first episode promise greater things for her character and Vance’s Uncle George brings a sense of wisdom and hard-earned experience to the trio.

The cinematography fills a night encounter rich saturated colors from blood red flares while daylight excursions have a washed out colorless and joyless oppression to them, reflecting well the dual nature of the story and the show, fantastical weird apparitions existing alongside with banal historical evil. The show’s soundtrack is a mix of period and modern music and that I found a little jarring but other viewers are less likely to have their suspension of disbelief bumped by the choices.

It is nigh on impossible to adequately judge a story by just 10 percent of its content other than to say that the characters and encounters are all laid out in a pleasing, engaging manner and if the entire series maintains this quality, we are in for one frightening ride.

Share

Streaming Review: Sputnik

With the pandemic closing exhibition theaters movie watching has transitioned to on-line model and experience and the selection of feature on-line is expanded from what would normally be available at the local megaplex showing mostly tent-poles movies with a very few scattered smaller films in the smaller auditoriums. This weekend a friend and I discovered a Russian science-fiction horror film that had been released August 14th for Video of Demand and not at the ‘theater at home’ price of $20 but a mere 7.

Sputnik is set in 1983 during a time when the Soviet Union still existed and competed with the Americans both globally and beyond. Dr Tatyana Klimova, (Oksana Akinshina) a brilliant but unconventional psychiatrist is summoned to a remote facility on the steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan to treat the sole survivor of a recent orbital mission, Konstantin (Fyodor Bondarchuk). Konstantin suffers from specific amnesia and can’t recall what happened during the mission, the return to earth, of is even aware that his fellow cosmonaut was killed. Convinced that she has not been given all the pertinent facts Tatyana forces the officer in charge Col Semiradov, to reveal what has been kept from her and the reason that everything has been located in this isolated facility, Konstantin did not return alone but now harbors an alien parasite but all attempts to separate the cosmonaut from the creature have failed and Semiradov fears that Konstantin is withholding something from them all.

When we rented Sputnik based on the strength of its trailer, we honestly expect nothing more than mediocre Alien clone but the film exceeded our expectations. While it is far from a perfect film Sputnik is competently written, acted, and directed taking its time to reveal the horrors both alien and human as secrets drip from the script like water from a leaky faucet. Akinshina is well cast as the troubled doctor and Bondarchuk manages both the ‘Hero of the Union’ aspect of his cosmonaut while slowly revealing the character’s more human and sometimes darker nature. The cinematography is atmospheric and moody with the visual effects of alien credible in every scene.

While I would seriously hesitate to recommend this as an expensive ‘theater at home’ rental, for a more usual video on demand rental fee I was quite satisfied and willing to suggest this to fans of moderately graphic SF horror.

Share

A Grab Bag of Items

The Haunted Palace

This is a Roger Corman movie that supposedly is part of his Poe cycle of the adaptation but in reality it is a film version of The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. A single line from a poem by Poe is used to justify the pretense adaptation but as a Lovecraft film it actually works pretty well. It’s always nice to see Vincent Price in one of these moody atmospheric films. I’m glad I sent away for the Blu-ray from the U.K.

The NRA

Last week the Attorneys General for the State of New York and the District of Columbia files suits to dissolve the National Rifle Association. The NRA operates as a non-profit organization dedicated education and training of the general public on matters related to firearm use and ownership with a supposedly side interest in lobbying and political work. The suits however are not related to lobbying and political activism but rather focus on corruption and the senior leadership using the non-profit as their own personal profit centers and in that respect the suits are not dissimilar to the ones used to dissolve the Trump Foundation that had also engaged in serious financial corruption.

There are those who advance the idea that this is an election year political ploy by the various Attorneys General to harm the GOP in the upcoming election but I have serious doubts about that hypothesis. This action is likely to energize the GOP base and provoke them to turn out in greater numbers and with less than 90 days until the election it is highly doubtful that these suits can sideline the NRA before the voting. Legal gears do not turn that quickly. I think it is clear that the New York AG was hostile to the NRA but it is also clear that the NRA suffered from deep systemic corruption.

Horrible Imaginings Film Festival

Next month is the 11th annual Horrible Imaginings Film Festival and the first year that the festival will be entirely virtual. The pandemic has been terrible with the economic damage and the loss of life that is nowhere near ending and in these dark fearful times it is good to find what little joy and light there is and one of those things is the festival dedicated to horror films short and long from around the world. I have taken days off around that weekend and while I will desperately miss the in-person event at the Freda Cinema I will thoroughly enjoy the films.

 

Share

Late to the Party: Blood Quantum

Okay I really should have watched this months ago when it premiered on Shudder and that streaming service is still the only place to view the new zombie film.

Hailing from Canada Blood Quantum is a zombie movie set in 1981 on a Canadian Native-American reservation. Produced, directed, written, and starring member of First Nation Tribes the film approaches the now tired zombie sub-genre from a thematic perspective of colonization and does a damn fine job of it.

The story centers on Traylor, his estranged wife Joss, their son Joseph and his pregnant white girl friend and Joseph’s half-brother and Traylor’s delinquent son ‘Lysol.’ The movie unfolds in two distinct periods, the first day, the day the Zombie plague erupted and six months later as winter approaching and the tribe is dealing with an influx of refugees to the safe harbor that they have created on the former reservation. The twist to the genre and source of the film’s title is the quirk that Native Americans are immune to the infection bites of the zombie and do not rise up as walking corpses. All of the is driven by the Native-American characters with their interpersonal dynamics and prejudices propelling the plot. Much like the little seen Maggie this is a family drama that unfolding during a zombie pandemic but albeit with much more Dawn of the Deadinspired blood and gore effects.

Blood Quantum is a shining example of how to use speculative fiction and its unreality to explore issue bedeviling our real world without pulling out a tired soapbox or losing track of the entertainment required to keep an audience engaged. If you have access to Shudder this is a movie well worth watching.

Share

Anticipation

This year there has been precious little to look forward to. It started well with the release of my book in March and my first in-person author event at the tremendous Mysterious Galaxy but the pandemic swept the globe, shuttering society, collapsing the economy, and leaving a terrible toll of death in its wake. In the face of cataclysmic events my little novel and its release seemed such a small thing. Still, I am grateful to everyone who has been ordering on-line and those who have left such positive reviews. Honest, I did not pay them for that.

Normally science-fiction conventions are events that help moderate my mood but naturally those have been canceled or moved to purely on-line gatherings.

Luckily the pandemic has not stolen from me entirely one of the year’s most enjoyable and anticipated events the Horrible Imaginings Horror Film Festival.

The festival was founded in 2009 by my pal Miguel Rodriguez and year after year has grown. Due to scheduling and other real-life issues I was never able to attend until 2015 but each year after that this has been one of my go to jams for good times, good people, and great discoveries.

Naturally this year there is no in-person festival but there will be an on-line celebration and exhibition. This is not as fun as a few hundred attendees jamming into the terrific Freda Cinema in Orange County for big screen presentations of short and feature length horror films from around the globe but there still will be new and exciting cinema to discover. I have already experienced the on-line presentation with Miguel’s quarterly mini-festival Campfire Tales and the process works well and while it is no substitute for a proper theater screen my 55” 4K television is passable for experiencing new and exciting film.

I have already purchased my all access pass for the festival and the next year’s worth of Campfire Tales so September should have a least a few moments of horrifying escapism to make life more bearable.

 

Share

Revisiting Sleep Hollow

Last night, with a big bowl a buttered popcorn, I put the DVD into the machine and settled in to enjoy 1999’s Sleep Hollow. Directed by Tim Burton, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, and starring Johnny Depp. Sleepy Hollow was less of an adaptation of the classic tale by Washington Irving and more of an excursion by Burton into the lovely lush landscape of a classic Hammer Horror movie.

Hammer Studios was a UK film company that produced many genres of movies but is perhaps best known for their impressive run of horror film starting with The Quatermass Xperiment a feature film adaptation of a live television play and running through the dismal and tired To the Devil a Daughter. Between those films Hammer discovered and promoted actors who would go on to be some of the biggest genre stars in the world, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Bring color to Frankenstein with their production The Curst of Frankenstein Hammer studios leaned into exploitive film styles with garish blood and explicit imagery of human organs that previous studios had obscured with edits.

Sleepy Hollow, though with a muted color plate save for vividly bright blood, is thoroughly a throwback to these Hammer Films, Burton has populated the cast with distinguished British actors and a small speaking part for Hammer’s star Christopher Lee as a New York City judge. While the film is supposedly set in New York state the manner, accents, and culture of the cast and characters scream a British environment. The set design in this movie doesn’t reflect Burton’s usual obsessions with German expressionism but reflects a more grounded realistic approach to the setting something I think may have come from the producer Francis Ford Coppola who just a few years earlier had experiment himself with classic horror directing his production of Dracula.

In this film inspired by the classic story Ichabod Crane isn’t a schoolteacher but a young police detective dedicated to science and reason as the sole methods for solving any crime’s mystery. He is dispatched to the isolated settlement of Sleepy Hollow to investigate a series of murders by beheading. Upon arrival the town’s leading citizens advised him that these are no ordinary killing but rather the supernatural vengeance of a hessian mercenary slain during the Revolutionary War. Dismissing the stories of ghosts and goblins Crane finds himself in a tangled mystery of greed, forbidden love, and undead mercenaries while discovering the truth of his own forgotten history.

Sleepy Hollow is an enjoyable film that doesn’t put on airs with a greater meaning buried in its subtext. It is an entertaining tale of love, greed, and vengeance that uses the Washington Irving story for a few moments of imagery but lives and succeeds on its own terms.

Share

Movie Review: Little Monsters (2019)

Little Monsters a 2019 Zombie-Comedy is a bit of a ‘bait and switch.’ The trailer and promotional material pushes the storyline of Miss Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) as a kindergarten teacher who must keep her charges safe during a zombie outbreak while simultaneously keeping the small children from understanding the truth of their dire situation by making it all an elaborate game. Those plot elements do make up a substantial portion of the film’s second and thirds acts but Miss Caroline is not the story’s protagonist.

The story’s main character is David, a pot-addicted, obscenity spewing, failed street busking musician, man-child. So, the core plot of Little Monstersis a very tired one, the immature man forced into adulthood. David intersects with Miss Caroline and her class because his nephew Felix is one of her students and after becoming enamored with Miss Caroline David accompanies her and the class on the field trip where the zombie outbreak take place.

A third central character is Teddy McGiggles played by comedian Josh Gad, a popular American children’s television host on tour through Australia where the film is set. in another expedition to trope-ville Teddy is a boozing, foul, kid-hating character with little to differentiate him from similar characters that have come before.

What saved Little Monsters and made the viewing enjoyable was the immense talent of Lupita Nyong’o. This woman as an actor is simply credible in everything she plays and can draw in a viewer while making a character that on the page feels rather worn fresh and complex. Had the movie been centered on her character rather than the fairly typical David the movie would have been greatly enhanced and it is no surprise that the marketing focused on the movie’s greatest asset.

In this movie much of the comedy works though there is a fair amount of ‘cringe’ comedy focused on a character’s lack 0f self-realization that brings public embarrassment, so on that front your mileage may vary. The story’s approach to the nephew Felix is charming and the both the young actor and the character are endearing enough to pull the viewer into serious concern when he is threatened.

Overall this is worth at least one viewing though you must remember that it is not until the second act that the film’s real star and emotional heart arrives.

Little Monsters is currently streaming on Hulu as a Hulu Original.

Share

More Movies: Voice from the Stone

Voice from the Stone is a 2017 atmospheric horror film with Games of Thronesstar Emilia Clarke leading the small cast. It centers on Verena (Clarke) a young nurse that lives with families to help psychologically troubled children. She has come to the Rivi family is post war Tuscany to help with Jakob who has not spoken for several months following the death of his mother Malvina. Welcomed to the family by Malvina’s mother Lilia and more coolly by her husband Klaus Verena
finds Jakob a difficult case and the young boy’s obsessive listening to the stonework of the ancient house intent to hear his mother’s voice from beyond grave layers a sense of insanity onto the boy’s silent condition. Finding herself increasingly attracted, in part due to Lilia’s prompting, to Klaus and with her attempts to help Jakob failing Verena becomes desperate to remain with the family in the isolated mansion.  Eventually twists are revealed and the story lands in a far too easily predicted conclusion.

Despite starring an actor from a global sensation Voice from the Stone received only a limited release in 2017 and was primarily a Video on Demand product. Currently streaming on the horror specialty service Shudder, Voice from the Stone fails to create a sense of building dread and inevitability essential for slow burn atmospheric horror and instead plays as a family drama that only in the final acts makes any move towards the unsettling and horrific. Adapted from an Italian novel I suspect that the source material is very much an interior story driven mostly by the Verena’s thoughts and suppressed emotional reactions and while that can be translated to film it is a particularly difficult task that has foiled more talented filmmakers. About a third of the way into this movie brief running time of 87 minutes I voiced the opinion that this could very well turn about to be quite similar to Henry James’ The Turning of the Screw another horror story that relies heavily on the psychological life of its central character but instead this story does come to a definitive conclusion and not a unsettling ambiguity.

Voice from the Stone failed to fully engage me as a viewer and failed to deliver any revelation that surprised or shocked and instead proceeded in a plodding manner to an ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. It is not a film I can recommend.

 

Share